Regent's Park - truly one of London's 'green lungs'.

Opportunities for the general public to visit the top of the BT Tower are few and far between. Today, though, hundreds got the chance courtesy of the Ellen MacArthur Cancer Trust. The catch? The small matter of 843 steps to climb.

The vertical endurance had its rewards. The views from the rotating room at the top of the BT Tower are stunning at any time, but on this sunniest of days, the aspect was breathtaking.

Money raised in sponsorship from the event (and from those paying to use the lift) will be pumped into the Cancer Trust. The charity aims to ‘rebuild the confidence‘ of young cancer patients by teaching them the skills and teamwork of sailing. The climb also supports Barretstown, a similar charity that bolsters the self-esteem of ill children by organising activity retreats.

Disclaimer: We attended the breakfast event on invitation from the Ellen MacArthur Trust. We took the lift.

No, Mr Bond, I expect you to live.

Meanwhile, over in Harley Street, they’re playing with knives in the fight against tumours. The cyberknife is a robotic tool to complement and improve on existing radiotherapy techniques. It contains no blade, but comprises a high-precision source of radiation mounted on the kind of robotic arm more commonly associated with car manufacture. The arm minutely adjusts the direction of the beam to compensate for movement in the patient, which helps score a bulls-eye on the tumour. This precision makes the bionic appendage ideal for reaching the parts other therapies cannot reach, and greatly reducing the number of sessions needed. From February, the treatment will be available privately (at a cost of £25,000 – ouch), but could debut on the NHS when the pleb patients promise not to make predictable Dr Who jokes soon.

Image courtesy of Dave Bullock / eecue, reproduced under a Creative Commons license. Flickr.

London cancer patients and their families have one more resource at the ready to help them cope — the Maggie’s cancer care centre at Charing Cross Hospital in Hammersmith.

Designed to fill in where traditional hospitals fall short, the Maggie’s centre will give free information and support to those affected by cancer — specifically much-needed psychological help for patients and their families. They’re able to offer help for free through partnerships with local NHS Trusts.

TV chef Nigella Lawson and Sarah Brown, Mr PM’s wife, were on hand to open the £3.5 million, Sir Richard Rogers-designed centre today, which will follow in the footsteps of five successful Maggie’s centres in Scotland.

Image courtesy of Mark Haerl’s Flickrstream.

173 patient medical documents this time. The cache of personal information was discovered in a bag near Kingston Hospital. The files contain data on cancer and HIV patients plus ‘information on those attending conception and addiction clinics, as well as sexual disease and hepatitis test results’.

Fortunately, the records are anonymised. But the hospital, ironically an NHS Trust, has no idea how the files escaped. Patients, or customers as they’re probably known these days, will receive a written apology. Assuming the notes don’t go missing in the post.

Over the past year, private data has been leaking faster than a denim wetsuit. The UK Government, for example, recently mislaid disks containing bank details of 25 million people. Our supposedly private details are leading a hedonistic life of freedom, getting lost in the post, misplaced in a ‘secure facility’, stolen, hacked, shared by P2P, lost again, and voluntarily published in the pages of The Sun by an idiot.

The whole sorry catalog can be read here. With the proposed introduction of ID cards, and new laws to make negligent data handling a criminal offence, information security is going to be one of the hot potatoes of the next few years.

If you have been affected by these issues, write to your MP. Or send us a tenner and we’ll let you have his or her mobile phone number, medical history and inside leg measurement.

Vaguely relevant image taken from Ian-S’ Flickr photostream.